Low power cells, such as femto cells or pico cells, form part of a heterogeneous network and are being deployed within macro cells in order to increase data throughput and provide better coverage at the cell edge of the macro cell. Such low power cells are typically deployed in an unplanned manner with regard to the macro cell and a macro cell may have a large number of the low-powered cells in a clustered cell deployment.
In such a clustered cell deployment, a user equipment (UE) may experience multiple handovers while traversing through the macro cell coverage area. Such handovers may result in data interruption and/or additional packet delay for each handover. The data interruption and additional packet delays, especially when occurring multiple times, may result in a poor user experience.